For my Blackberry 8800, I recently purchased MobileTracker from Skylab Mobilesystems Ltd. after reading this review.
I was quite disappointed with its results.
To say the software was buggy is an understatement. First, there was no way to see if it was tracking anything. It would consistently track zero points in my tracklogs. The only workaround I found to make it track something was to run Blackberry Maps in the background. And even then, if the GPS coverage was lost at one point, MobileTracker would stop tracking for good. I had a few email exchange with their customer support and supplied them with some errors I found in my Blackberry’s internal log. After a few email exchanges, they said I should soon receive a new version that was almost ready.
This morning I received MobileTracker 1.2.0 in my inbox. What a difference this new version makes! Here are the new features as supplied by the vendor:
- Recording:
- Timestamp tracking
- Traveled time from start for every position on track
- Average Speed of track
- Traveled time of track
- Traveled distance of track
- User interface:
- Status indicator
- Live coordinate output
- Live distance output from start
- Simplified User Interface
- Adjustable altitude mode
I tested it out a few times today and during my tests, it could recover from loss of GPS coverage to continue tracking points when coverage returned. Also, because of the added indicator, I can easily see that it is continuing tracking new points. They improved the KML Google Earth export with the added recording information so it is easier to consult your tracklogs in Google Earth.
From my limited testing, it seems that it might finally be an interesting solution to keep a log of your excursions. For the traveled distance of the track, I noticed you should be careful with the settings for the interval between tracked points. At 1 second per point, maybe because I was in the city, the Blackberry GPS, which isn’t extremely precise, didn’t give a fixed position when I wasn’t moving: so, it gave the impression I was still moving. Since, you can adjust the interval, you probably can find a setting that will fit your tracking needs.
One of the things I will definitely want to use this for is for geo-tagging photos. Since we now have the time for each points tracked, it should be feasible to convert the KML file in an appropriate format to induce the location at a particular time in order to automatically match these with the time a picture was taken.
If I find an easy way to geotag pictures using this, I’ll make a new post. I am pretty confident it can become the basis to geotag photos I will take.